The institute of electrical and electronics engineers (IEEE) 802.16 standard provides a technique and protocol for supporting broadband wireless access. The standardization had been conducted since 1999 until the IEEE 802.16-2001 was approved in 2001. The IEEE 802.16-2001 is based on a physical layer of a single carrier (SC) called ‘WirelessMAN-SC’. The IEEE 802.16a standard was approved in 2003. In the IEEE 802.16a standard, ‘WirelessMAN-OFDM’ and ‘WirelessMAN-OFDMA’ are further added to the physical layer in addition to the ‘WirelessMAN-SC’. After completion of the IEEE 802.16a standard, the revised IEEE 802.16-2004 standard was approved in 2004. To correct bugs and errors of the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard, the IEEE 802.16-2004/Cor1 (hereinafter, IEEE 802.16e) was completed in 2005 in a format of ‘corrigendum’.
At present, there is ongoing standardization effort for the IEEE 802.16m standard which is a new technical standard based on the IEEE 802.16e. The IEEE 802.16e system uses a time division duplex (TDD) scheme in which a downlink (DL) and an uplink (UL) are divided in a time division manner, whereas the IEEE 802.16m is scheduled to use not only the TDD scheme but also a frequency division duplex (FDD) scheme in which the DL and the UL are divided in a frequency division manner. Furthermore, in order to improve a transfer rate, a frame of the IEEE 802.16m system is designed by considering bandwidth expansion, decrease in a cyclic prefix (CP) size, transmission in a subframe unit in which a frame is partitioned into a plurality of subframes, resource mapping in multiple cells, etc.
The resource mapping in multiple cells is a method in which a physical resource unit (PRU) is mapped to a contiguous resource unit (CRU) and a distributed resource unit (DRU) in a frequency domain and the CRU and the DRU are allocated to a cell (or sector) specific resource by dividing the CRU and the DRU into one or more frequency partitions. A subband is a unit of 4 contiguous PRUs among all PRUs. CRUs are configured in a subband unit. That is, after subband partitioning is performed to divide the PRU into the CRU and the DRU, a basic size of physically contiguous radio resources in the frequency domain is one subband. User data or a control signal may have a various size. Optionally, physically contiguous radio resources with a size greater than or equal to one subband or 4 PRUs in the frequency domain may be necessarily used for the user data or the control signal. However, there is no proposed method capable of allocating a radio resource for a channel requiring the physically contiguous radio resources with a size greater than or equal to one subband or 4 PRUs in the frequency domain. In addition, even in a case of using physically contiguous PRUs with a size less than or equal to 4 PRUs in the frequency domain, a specific region cannot be randomly used in a full frequency domain, and thus can be used limitedly only within a resource allocated to the subband.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method capable of transmitting user data or a control signal requiring physically contiguous radio resources greater than or equal to a predetermined size in a frequency domain.